Comments

Comment by Doomedphate

Comment by Shockna

Yeah, on massive servers it tends to take hundreds of players, regardless of faction, to down Bolvar/Thrall.

Comment by whitedragon254

notice how it changed from slaying Bolvar to slaying Varian now? Varian is almost def now replacing bolvar for sure.

Comment by Kalx

The guy just came back from somewhere and we already have the duty of putting him down.

Awesome!

Comment by Roa33

Heh, I was once in a raid for Stormwind on my server that included 4 raid groups (Yes thats 160 people), We had to watch our spacing so as to not crash the server lol, but we got to the path leading up to Stormwind and then an alliance came out with like 2/3s health for whatever reason and everyone basically wanted to start killing things so then we charged after the alliance and just went in Stormwind and rocked the entire city killing everything from the bankers, to the AH, to the King and then we preceded to the Deeprun tram to try and rush the next boss, but we pretty much had already done we planned to do.

And for those wondering what my FPS was.... I had about 2-5fps with a Nvidia 8800 GTS card inside the Kings room. It probably took the raid about 2-3min to down the boss.... rofl pwned.

Comment by ihatethealliance

i cant wait 2 do this achievement

Comment by Adrict

This will likely be the hardest city raid to accomplish, simply due to the fact that Varian Wrynn is standing twenty feet from the Stormwind Battlemasters.

That combined with the long walk from Eastvale Logging Camp would give Alliance players more then enough time to get 100+ people defending him (at least on my server).

This pretty much means you either kill him on your first try, or come back another day. >.>

Sylvanas might also be difficult, but Undercity dosent have anywhere near the amount of people hanging around as Stormwind (again, on my server at least).

Comment by Batleth

Yeah I think I can confirm that all of the Faction leaders have been buffed in response to the new Achievement. I observed a group of 40 Horde rush into SW Keep last night only to be absolutely obliterated by the King and the guards. I really want to know what his abilities are, because when they aggro'd him, he ran into the middle of their group and about 10 seconds later they were all dead. They didn't even make it up the ramp.

Comment by karti

Killed him last night with 3 Raidgroups.

Only the raidgroup which tagged him first got the achievment, though this seems to be a bug, or so the GM told us.

Unlike Tyrande and Velen, who died (thrice) earlier tonight and respawned after about 20 minutes, this one has 6 hours respawn time.

GM did not respawn him for us, nor did he give the achievment to all of us.

Comment by DELczeano

Hey, the King's back!

... and now he's dead.

Comment by Ummeiko

This is coming from the perspective of a guild that downed him at lvl 70, so I imagine things will only get easier with level.

He can be solo tanked, although having multiple tanks building threat on him is not a bad idea in case of alliance interference (Mind Control, Cyclone, MS Debuff) or random death. He hits fairly hard, though not as hard as Magni, and if there were no outside interference, a well geared tank could probably be kept up by two healers (our raid was almost all sunwell geared).

Even his whilrwind will not always oneshot a non-tank, but the general strategy was for melee to wait for a whirlwind, go in and do approx 3 attacks, then run out and wait again. His heroic leap ability can be outranged by casters/healers, though getting that range would depend on where you tanked him if you keep him in the throne room. In reality, the heroic leap was more of a nuisance than a threat. Assuming you don't have all of your healers directly on top of each other (and thus all getting stunned), the damage is small enough to be irrelevant. He CAN whirlwind immediately after a leap (before returning to the tank), which can be deadly if the ranged group can't react fast enough.

As an aside (that will honestly not be relevant for long) we went back and killed him a second time during the scourge invasion, when he was moved to the harbor. It became a fourpull, with Varian, Bolvar (who is still a boss-type mob, though he's not tuned for level 80 and has only about 1 million HP), Valeera Sanguinar (80 elite), and Broll Bearmantle (80 elite). The fight and his abilities were no different, and so long as you kept Bolvar's aoe Hammer of Justice out of the raid it wasn't much harder to control. It should be known that any of them will respawn a few minutes after dying, so you should be careful to not pull a freshly spawned add into an in-progress fight. Varian also has a much much shorter respawn time during the event (don't know exactly but less than 15 minutes), which is a shame as I for one would have liked to interrupt the alliance efforts into Northrend.

Comment by Limi

Respawn time of King Varian Wrynn is 6 hours

Comment by tlarn

One could use the Death Knight's Path of Frost spell in order to run into Stormwind through the Harbor area, by mounting up and running over the water from the northern edge of Westfall.

The raid I was in did this during the wee hours of what was technically Monday morning, so very few Alliance were around. This may not be the case with other times, or other servers, however.

Comment by haxkq

i do not know how peopel can find tis hard i think this is the easyest of all 4 bosses.last night we whent in sw whit 0 healers 0 MAIN SPEC HEALERS all offspec (we didnt kill him cuz some emo guy ninjad him but suprisly afther 3 mins he wase down to 3.75mill hp we got whiped on his hard attack hitting me 10k...

Comment by TheCreed

Where did this guy return from? I've heard something about a prison pre-bc but i didn't play WoW then.

Would have been nice if he came back from a crusade against something, like Prince Edward :/

Comment by seaniesharko

Did this twice with a normal raid group... no problems.

Comment by Negi

Ehehehe... just did it today wiv like 3 raid groups on a chinese server. We decided not to clear our way in, and all of us died our way in, thenhid in the room on the RIGHT of the king. An engineer made a repair bot and we repaired, then killed the king. EASY! Well, we're 70 against 75 guards, which made it a bit hard, but that can't be helped, cuz we ARE playing chinese servers which can't use wrath...

Comment by Gnomeeatr

Trying to do this acivment is heck, i recently tried on Bladefist server and my guild downed 2 bosses (the dranei and the nelf) But we got reckless and went for a 3rd boss thinking WG will distract them.......there not that stupid >.< but yea were gonna try agian

Comment by Cornbreader

Did this with one raid group on the Boulderfist server. The only reason we survived the alliance was that we all rode by the main square and then turned around to defend ourselves from the alliance. To be honest we were probably lucky that maybe a lot of them were afk, I've never seen so many allies and I've been to Stormwind only once in order to run the stockade dungeon on my druid.

Anyways, he's no problem, just don't pull the battlemaster and you are also near that train, so make quick work of him before the allies tear you a new one.

Comment by Valkari

*sigh* I just did this with a pug "For the Horde!" raid on Blackwing Lair, and we had killed Whisperwind and Valen. We also killed King Wyrnn, but not a single person in our raid got the achievement for some dumb reason.

The group didn't stay together long enough to go for the dwarf king...

Woo! The patch not only made it so you can get the achievement for killing the King, but when I logged on, I already had the achievement. So glad I don't have to kill him again.

Comment by skywalk

The same happened to our raid just now. No one in the raid received credit. The achievement appears to be suffering from some post-patch blues. You may want to hold off on getting a group together for this one until Blizzard lets us know it's been fixed.

Comment by logobola

Fixed in 3.1.1:

From blue post for patch notes today 4/21Corrected an issue preventing players from earning the achievement, “Storming Stormwind.” Players who were not properly awarded this achievement for completing the objective should retroactively be granted completion.

Comment by Amrun

lol @ achievement icon

In my opinion, the toughest of the Alliance city bosses.

If you started in Ironforge, you should just take the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind. Stormwind Keep is nearby.

If you don't start in Ironforge, you can summon players to the Deeprun Tram. Being in the Tram room does NOT flag you for PvP (unless, of course, you are on a PvP server), though chances are every player in every city will know you're coming. For this reason, I reccommend swimming up the coast of Westfall and summoning there. Stay behind the cliff face so nobody can see you. Then, when you're ready, have Death Knights pop path of frost and mount up. Go up the stairs and through the city (it's a decent run). Just make sure nobody falls off the stairs because of lag like they did in my raid.

Remember: Players > Boss. When faced with players, kill them ASAP. Death Knights should go first, along with healers (at least, silence healers if possible). Fortunately the closest graveyard is a short walk outside of the city, so you shouldn't have to fight a player more than 3 times at most.

Because it's probably the most populated Alliance city (maybe Ironforge), expect player resistance and lots of it.

Comment by HordeGirl15

ROFLMFAO Oh that is ironic!

Comment by Salami

Makes me sad i rolled ally, i'd love to kill this iddiot, wish we had to kill Garrosh not Thrall.

So yeah, i'd love to punch this guy right in his.. chin.

Comment by fotis1096

it was very easy, we just walked on water and we entered the city from the docks

Comment by Teldarsterallnes

I am alliance, and i see no reason not to kill Varian. he's just an %^&*!@#

Comment by Aera

Extremely easy killed with single raid groups of random 70-80 ungeared mindless people with no tactics. He is no challenge, nor is the defending alliance that may intervene (unless they get word of a coming attack long before the horde arrive).

Comment by Volchan

2-manned it today. Me - 6k Bear Druid, Friend - 6k Ret Pally.

No resistance from the Alliance was cool. We originally went there just mucking around. Then we grabbed a Holy pally and finished off the other 3 for our achieves.

Comment by jobhaha

OMG CAN I PLEASE HAVE YOUR TREATH, VARIAN>?

Comment by jobhaha

sorry^^

Comment by Lohomoko

As a level 62 in a raid group of mostly 80s in Warsong, we just failed to kill the King. I'm fairly certain in this newest patch, the fact that all the Alliance leaders are in the very same room as one another - even if we already killed Tyrande and then Velen, we have to kill them again, along with Gelbin, Magni, Jaina and, of course, Varian.

I'd say it's harder than ever to beat him, but I've still got plenty of levels to advance before I'm actually going to be a huge help in a raid.

Comment by Lostelf

just saw the king die 20 min ago i was on my ally acc but cheered the horde players on i would do the same to garrosh but NEVER sylvanas she sufferd too much

Comment by Ghaghzull

I wanted to confirm this as a heads up. Your going need few tanks for this fight. I went to see how hard dose Varian and Genn hits, what I found out that its seen that Battle masters were link to Varian I was no were near the aggro range for me to pull them. So I hope any furture FTH raiders would hope readied this comment and come better prepare.

Comment by Craxen

This achievement is a pain the ass for hordes, first of all they need to deal with Varian, keep an eye at Genn, and pick up if the Battlemasters are incoming since they are linked to Varian. And do not forget about all the Alliance players, Stormwind is the new capital for the most of them and would probably pay attention if the Stormwind king would be under attack.

Comment by suffacate

Just completed it today.

When we got to SW, I used a spell called (which mass summons everyone to your location, it's the level 21 guild perk) to the side room that's next to the King Varian's main room. It's all grassy and there's no guards. It gave Alliance little notice to be there to defend.

I, personally, recommend downing all the Battlemaster's first and having 3 - 4 tanks and 9 - 11 healers at least. Once all the Battlemaster's are down, keep 2 tanks on Varian and 1 or 2 Greymane and you're set. Make sure those Alliance don't pick you off from the 2 side rooms or the hall! Good luck, it's very fun to do!

And if you don't have anyone with that level guild, I suggest using the tram that connects IF to SW and get to Varian really quickly but not being sloppy at the same time, have a plan ready.

Comment by Aylin

Did this raid with 80 people and still failed :/

Comment by suffacate

Update: As of 4.1, there are only 2 Battlemasters in Stormwind Castle (3 on Call to Arms weekends), down from 4 (or possibly 5).Battlemasters fear every few seconds and do massive damage. They're also pulled automatically when Varian is attacked or aggroed because they're linked to Varian. So it should be easier to do SW now.

Comment by Westward

I just completed this today with a 40 man raid group and I was main tank. The battle masters are not linked to the king as of 6/12/2011 and neither is Genn Greymaine. I would highly suggest NOT tanking him in the room that he's in and pulling him into the courtyard area next to his room so you don't pull Genn and the Battle Masters with AOE or fear bombs. If you follow this method, make sure that your raid is spread out only on the closest half of the room or he will reset when he heroic leaps to far away players. He did this twice during our successful attempt and we had to start over on his massive health pool. Pop lust's and cooldowns early enough and you may get two or three rounds of them. The whole encounter lasted 14 min with both resets and the eventual kill. The only attacks he has is a heroic leap and a whirlwind which does not wipe aggro.

Our raid consisted of three tanks, 9 healers and the rest DPS. 1 main tank is fine for the boss, he didn't hit me that hard with 356 equipped ilvl. Keep the three other tanks on reserve if any other adds like Genn or the Battle Masters pull. Battle Masters get priority on the kill order because the fear bomb they cast will end your attempt really fast. They only have about 4mil health so they should die pretty quickly. Genn aggro'd about midway through the fight and once he was picked up by our off tank he was largely ignored.

Good luck, have fun.

Comment by R1NN1

I've been wondering why Horde go to boss by using the main entrance and gates or the tram, as the garden with no roof (so you can fly inside) would be the easiest way: http://anttipaasivaara.eu/web/wow/raid/plan1.jpg and allys cant see hordes flying to boss and set the alarm / their raids right way.

Comment by XxTheRage127xX

This strategy can get you to Wrynn quickly. Fly to the western side of the keep. This is a part of the keep where there are just 2 NPCs, not even guards. After you kill them (should be an easy wipe), it is wise to buff up and rush in. There are 5 guards (counting the 84) on the walls to your left and right. 4 more guards stand on the opposite wall with an patrol coming in and out the door opposite to the one you entered. After you wipe the guards (and Wrynn's son....probably)he should be easy to kill. He stands by his throne with Genn Graymane. Good luck and Good hunting.

Comment by dragonarcane

it says that there are 38 coments here, but i can't see any. oh well. on storming stormwind, cata has helped out greatly. first off, we can now fly there. so you fly up from the hill side right behind the palace. set down on the hill behind the library. when your ready to raid you just fly through that big open roof over the library garden and straight inti the throne room. easy peasy.

Comment by Esploratore

I don't know how you can say cata has helped out with this... The boss had 5 millions back in wrath, I heard, now 103; the dps didn't increase 20-21 times with cata, so good luck doing this in realms with balanced population.

Quel'thalas eu, 56% ally, 44% horde, so not really unbalanced realm.

My personal experience is: if you attack during the day there'll just be too many alliance 85s, even for 2 raid groups, which is very unlikely you'll get even on peak times.

If you attack overnight, you have more chance, stormwind will be less full of people, so you will have more time to nuke the boss before allies come.

Tried once at 3 a.m. with a 40-man group nuking the king in stormwind keep, got him to 50% when allies wiped us, 2 mins fight.

Tried again another night at around 4.30 a.m., had to whisper every single horde 85 online, got 25 people; was a hell of a good try, but ally started recruiting when they saw the king was in difficulty, and we wiped at 18%; over 10 mins fight, used 2 time-warps.

Tried again a few weeks later, around 3 a.m., but after having brought the king to 46% in 2 mins with relatively not many allies there, the tank made a mistake, so the king reset and by that time there were too many allies already.

Can probably nuke the boss down as fast as possible with a 40-man group overnight (less allies) with better gear, as mists of pandaria gets nearer, but still it's incredibly hard on balanced realms, or even unbalanced when you are in the faction with less members than the other one.

I'd like to hear if any successful attempt happened so far in cata, besides realms horde-dominated, ofc.

Comment by Esploratore

We went in with a 40-men group, 2 tanks, 5 healers, 33 dps, at around 2 a.m., there were at least 50 allies, thought already failed at start.

But when we got to the throne room, we saw some allies coming, I wasn't leader, but had raid warnings available, so I yelled a few times to kill allies first, then boss.

People listened, even if allies were more than us they just came in 5 at a time, or so.

This way, we always managed to kill them and reduce the damage.

Also don't forget an important thing: when allies die, it's true that they can run in fast, BUT they cannot resurrect for a given number of seconds which keep increasing if they keep dying, as in they come back less and less frequently during the fight, just need to kill them.

We lost max 2-3 members during the fight, some combat ress didn't even make necessary to run in.

Took like 5-6 mins, didn't calculate exactly, but had 5 min sated debuff, guess we used TW at start, so 5 mins fight.

After that, we went to all other cities and got the bear, was really funny, but the key was spamming a "for the horde" when recruiting and not "storming stormwind" (too many ally eyes and ears in horde chat) and most importantly kill allies, then boss, you always have time to kill it, if you let allies stack healers just won't be able to handle.

Here are 6 screenshots, from 31 millions to dead, started at 31 obviously, cause it's when I thought we could've made it.

If you don't believe this realm is more ally than horde just make a char and go check at whatever hour how many people are on each side, or search for quel'thalas eu statistics.

Comment by Falynn

Managed to pull this off with 18 people this week - just took some serious coordination and a group of people that knew exactly what to do ahead of time without screwing up/going off on their own.

We went in the front door, clearing guards as we went, and had our warrior pull Varian out of the throne room (sans Genn and the Battlemasters, as they are not leashed together), through the garden/courtyard and into the library. We left 4-5 people on the door as PVP control and had the rest of the group in the library on the king, with one person calling player targets. Doing the fight in the library has a few major benefits for the PVP aspect of the fight - Alliance can't fly directly in (as they can when you tank him in the courtyard) and it takes them considerably longer to figure out where you are, as many people don't instantly know where the room is.. Furthermore, it's much harder for them to fear/grip/CC your raid members into the throne room (resulting in accidental pulls of the remaining NPCs). And, lastly, the bookshelves in the library do not LOS your healers, so they can hide in the back out of sight.

Comment by Paladesh

Just a tip if you want to kill our team, dont go via the tram, you WILL get slaughtered....o wait never mind, go to the tram! We wont be there noooooo xD

Comment by thegodofhellfire

We did this on a heavily Alliance-dominated server (a 4.0.6 private server) some time ago. Here's how:

1) Organise the raid for a time when the server's population is low to avoid severe overcrowding in Stormwind. Get a raid group of decent-geared people together. We used a raid composition of 2 tanks, 12 healers, and 26 DPS.2) Get everyone to Blackwing Descent and start summoning using the summon stone there. Any Alliance that see you there will assume you're a raid for Blackwing Descent.3) Once everyone's ready, buff up and fly to Stormwind4) Land in the open garden next to the King's room. Send your main tank and off tank in to pick up Varian and Greymane respectively. Your off tank will need very little healing.5) Pull both Varian and Greymane out to the garden and let your DPS start blasting away. Varian first. Off tank Greymane for the entire fight.6) Send some of your best PvP geared players out of the garden and into the King's room (with a healer or two) to fight off any Alliance coming in. If you've timed your raid right and are doing it at off-peak times, then 5 of your DPS and 2 healers should be enough. They were for us. If there are no Alliance they can DPS the boss.7) Burn Varian down in the garden. Every time he uses his very damaging AoE, get your Holy Paladins (you WANT these guys for this fight, I did 27k HPS in scrub gear) to rape Holy Radiance. Holy Priests do well here too. Save battle resses for the tanks and healers.8) Watch Varian die. Get your achievement. Celebrate, then realise that Greymane is still alive. He should have taken between 5-10million damage from AoE. If you want, burn him down.9) Mount up and head off to the next city... to be posted in a guide sometime.

10) WIPE RECOVERY: Get out of the city any way you can. Regroup at Blackwing Descent and try some of the other cities while you wait for the Alliance to clear out of the King's room. This could take up to an hour. Hit Stormwind again later on.

Comment by moddolo

Since cross-realm, you can't do the achivement "Stoming Stormwind" if the servers of all group aren't linked between them. (at least, you will be in different phase inside Stormwind City)

Comment by mudfaerie

A group of about 30 people managed to forget that capital cities were instanced with cross-reams, leaving us with only 5 people from Arthas in the courtyard outside the King's room.

Deciding to fight him for the hell of it, we held up for a while before the blood DK started taking a ton of damage, and he asked me to take aggro. I taunted Wrynn, and cast Hand of Salvation on the DK. As soon as I placed that Hand, all the guards just DIPPED. We were left with only Wrynn in the courtyard.

Wrynn hits like a newborn kitten, so the blood DK's blood worm explosions were enough to keep the 5 of us at max health. It would have been time consuming, but we could have downed Wrynn's other 50% HP no problem if he hadn't reset.

Tonight I will test to see if the Hand of Salvation trick actually works, or if it was only a fluke.

As a side note, we didn't have to worry about allies attacking us because we were on Arthas, and allies on Arthas just don't care. We had a worgen /sit down next to us to watch the show.

EDIT: It was totally a fluke, but it's not hard to get Varian on his own anyway. Only taunt him and he'll bring maybe 1 or 2 guards into the courtyard.

Comment by Bartoh

Solo'ed as a 714 BM monk

After having missed the initial rush to get the achievement and being frustrated at no groups killing him on my realm I decided to solo Varian "for the lulz."However I did not think ahead. I forgot about the weekly scheduled resets. I pulled Varian at about 4:20 am and got him down to 32% before the servers went down at 5:30.He does not hit as hard as I had anticipated so it wasn't too difficult to stay alive. luckily during this time I did not have any enemy players attack me. According to Realmpop my realm (Hyjal) is mostly horde.

My strategy was to-check and see how many alliance are in Stormwind. (In my case very few)-land in garden area next to keep-kill two guards by entrance-Taunt Varian into garden-DPS and don't die. (repeat as long as it takes)

I will probably try again when the servers come back online but with a couple more people to make it go faster. I would expect hunters to be able to do this too with plus their better dps. Edit: Tried to solo again when servers came back up. got him down after 1h 22m.

TL;DR you don't need a huge 40 man raid to do this if your realm doesn't have too many alliance. Just grab some friends and go at it.

Comment by Rikoto

It seems after the events of the broken shore quest line which was released in the Legion pre-launch event, the objective is no longer to kill Varian Wrynn. You must kill his son, Anduin Wrynn.

Comment by Meltach

I'd just feel bad killing Anduin, really. In my eyes, and those of many others, I think, he's still just a kid.